Traditional Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y), and Black (K) (or CMYK) laser or Light Emitting Diode (LED) type printers come standard with Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black toner and/or drum cartridges. However, traditional black toner printers and CMYK toner printers are generally unable to print in white, metallic, or light toner as the foreground or as the background, as these printers lack the appropriate toner and/or drum cartridges and the appropriate raster image processor (RIP) software for printing cartridge re-mapping.
Printing in white toner is feasible through the use of white toner printers and would generally allow a user to print on dark or clear media, but white media printers are dedicated to CMYW only where white is always a top color. This system does not allow printing on clear or dark media and may require the user to buy an entirely new printer. Printers that print both in white and color are CMYKW printers with a minimum of five toner printing cartridges and white is always the last cartridge which does not allow a layer of white to be put down first as a background color.
Additionally, traditional CMYK printers have only been able to approximate metallic tones by blending CMYK colors. Metallic colors, such as gold, copper, brass, bronze, platinum, chrome, silver, and metallic tones of other colors, such as magenta, yellow, and cyan, can be done not using traditional printers, including by offset printing, silkscreen printing, and hot foil stamping, etc. Each of these has its own strengths, but none of them is really suited to the needs of on-demand printing. For example, in offset printing, each spot color requires its own plate, the production of which incurs cost. In silk screen printing and hot foil stamping also, plates and molds need to be made, requiring professional expertise and making the cost of each print that much more expensive, so that these technologies are not easy to apply unless a print run is of a certain size.
Similarly, printing light colors, such as light magenta or light cyan, is traditionally achieved using different combinations of the primary CMYK colors. However, since the primary CMYK colors are designed and tailored for printing bright, vivid, and high chroma graphics on plain paper these colors, in general, are not lightfast. Generally, these colors do not provide a “true” photographic lightfastness especially in the lower portion of the tone scales. Thus, the challenge remains to further improve the image quality and lightfastness of prints without sacrificing performance and reliability.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for converting or retrofitting a standard CMYK (four cartridge) toner printer to print using white, metallic, or light toner and wherein the layer of white, metallic, or light toner may be a background or foreground color.